“Encryption is inexorably tied to our national interests. It is a safeguard for our personal secrets and economic prosperity. It helps to prevent crime and protect national security." – A report from the bipartisan House Judiciary Committee & House Energy and Commerce Committee

News & Current Events

I don’t know if this is protection for your own privacy and your body or if it is an invasion of privacy for you and everyone around you. I’ll let you decide.

You know those bodycams that many police officers wear? Those are frequently in the news. Law enforcement wants them, many politicians are pushing for them, and communities that already have a strong police presence in their neighborhoods are demanding that the police get cameras now. Civil-rights groups are advocating for them. The White House is funding them.

Now a start-up company wants to sell you a personal bodycam that you can wear. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?

Equifax, which supplies credit information and other information services, said Thursday that a data breach could have potentially affected 143 million consumers in the United States. Literally over one third of the entire US population is at risk of identity theft now thanks to Equifax’s bungling. In reality, it will only affect adults as children normally do not have credit cards. 143 million is roughly half of all American adults.

The data breach obviously was criminal. What is perhaps even more criminal is that this is the third such data breach at Equifax in 16 months and yet the senior executives at Equifax continue to keep their data in unencrypted databases that are available to hackers! That’s beyond dumb!

Equifax, which supplies credit information and other information services, said Thursday that a data breach could have potentially affected 143 million consumers in the United States.

The population of the U.S. was about 324 million in 2017, according to Census Bureau estimates, which means the Equifax incident affects a huge portion of the country. Chances are that YOUR information was stolen. Be on the lookout for possible identity theft.

Equifax said it discovered the breach on July 29. “Criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files,” the company said.

According to a report in the IBSintelligence web site, websites run by some of the largest banks in the US have scored the poorest in a new security and privacy analysis audit. For US banking customers, only 27% of the 100 largest banks in the country are rated as “acceptable.”

I assume you do not want your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to snoop on your online activities and then to sell your web surfing information to commercial companies. Your data should be valuable, private, and most important, it’s yours. You should be the owner of your data and no one else, especially not a commercial company interested in selling your private data, should have access to your data.

Luckily, there are easy ways to block the snooping. I have already written about using a Virtual Private Network (see https://privacyblog.com/?s=vpn for my articles). However, that may require a bit more technical knowledge that may scare away computer novices.

A second solution is to use the Tor web browser and networking package. See https://www.torproject.org/ for details. Tor is a well-known and reliable privacy solution. However, Tor does slow your network connections significantly and does require a bit of technical knowledge to use it effectively.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) recently pointed out something that most security experts already figured out: the FBI and other US government agencies already monitor EVERYONE‘s phone calls, email conversations, tweets, and more. Nobody is immune to that. Obviously, Donald Trump’s communications were vacuumed up in those privacy-invading databases, along with communications from everyone else.

Speaking on the Fox News Channel, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned President Donald Trump’s detractors who argued there was no validity to his assertion that he had his “wires tapped” in a tweet earlier this month.

According to Paul, most people acknowledge Trump’s former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, a member of Trump’s presidential campaign, had been spied upon and it is coming down to what the definition of wiretap is.

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